BERKELEY — Donald A. Jelinek defended Ashby Flea Market vendors, Berkeley taxi drivers, Native Americans occupying Alcatraz Island and Vietnam War draft resisters, and sat on the Berkeley City Council for six years.

But what he told Jane Scherr (no relation to this writer), his wife of 30 years, was what he most wanted to be remembered for was his three years of civil rights work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Jelinek died peacefully at his south Berkeley home June 24 from lung disease. He was 82.

“Don had a deep sense of justice for diverse people,” Scherr said.

Born Feb. 17, 1934 to Jewish immigrant parents, Jelinek grew up in the Bronx, New York, earned his bachelor’s and law degrees from New York University and joined a Wall Street law firm where it looked like he would be made partner.

But at age 31, he went to Jackson, Mississippi for a planned three-week stint to defend civil rights workers and ended up staying in the South for three years, organizing with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and other groups, and defending black share croppers and civil rights workers, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., H. Rap Brown and Stokley Carmichel, whom Jelinek would call his “idol.”

In 1968 he founded the Southern Rural Research Project, which “powerfully raised issues of sharecropper hunger, malnutrition, and racist practices on the part of the Department of Agriculture,” according to Bruce Hartford, chronicler of the Veteran’s of the Civil Rights Movement

“SRRP is not fighting for the right to vote, the right to go to the ‘white’ school, restaurant or motel, nor for the right of the civil rights worker to demonstrate,” Jelinek wrote. “SRRP IS FIGHTING ONLY FOR PEOPLE TO HAVE A LITTLE FOOD, MEDICAL HELP AND OTHER BASIC ESSENTIALS OF LIFE.”

In July 1968, along with notables Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, and Andrew Young, Jelinek was invited to a meeting to explore creating an entity that would, according to former Berkeley Mayor Gus Newport, eventually birth New Communities, the first United States land trust founded by black farmers.

Jelinek’s 2015 book “White Lawyer, Black Power” tells the story of his civil rights work.

Toward the end of 1968, Jelinek left the South and began work in the Bay Area with American Indian Legal Services. This led to his defense of Native Americans who occupied Alcatraz Island for 19 months beginning in 1969, protesting what they said was the denial of their historic rights.

Jelinek went on to defend draft resisters and in 1973 became legal coordinator for 62 prisoners charged with felonies in connection with the 1971 Attica uprising where prisoners, demanding an end to abusive treatment, took guards as hostages. He tells that story in his 2011 book Attica Justice.

“After Attica I resumed earning a living,” Jelinek recounted in an oral history. “I was successful in a popular local action to bar our subway system from evicting flea market vendors who used their parking lot (originally, with their consent) on weekends. This propelled me into local politics. I was elected to three terms on the Berkeley City Council — and I thought the South was perilous.”

Jelinek served on the Berkeley City Council from 1984-90, but lost bids for mayor in 1994 and 1998 to Shirley Dean.

From 1999 until his death, Jelinek met regularly with other veterans of the civil rights movement whose stories are chronicled at www.crmvet.

In addition to Scherr, Jelinek is survived by Scherr’s daughters Dove and Apollinaire, and grandchildren Hannele and Pascal.

A memorial service will be at 1 p.m., July 16 at St. John’s Presbyterian Church, 2727 College Ave, Berkeley. Donations may be made to Bay Area Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement, c/o Eugene Turitz, 2124 Derby St. Berkeley, CA, 94705.